


Not With a Bang (But in a Glittering Cloud)

by Glinda



Series: Apocabingo [2]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Apocalypse, Community: tic_tac_woe, Corporate Espionage, Dubious Science, Gen, Implied Relationships, Saving the World, Teamwork, all consuming fire, morally dubious corporations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 20:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11905926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: It figures that of all the corporate evil they've faced, it would be Big Agra that would get closest to ending the world.





	Not With a Bang (But in a Glittering Cloud)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tic_tac_woe for my _all-consuming fire_ square. 
> 
>  
> 
> Listening to _Glittering Clouds_ by Imogen Heap while thinking about potential apocalypses took me strange places. For the purposes of this story the nanobots look more like tiny robot dragonflies than actual locusts but only because I needed them to be able to hover.

There’s something about the Big Agra jobs that always seem to hit them harder. The mind-set of these companies is no different, really, than those of their equivalents in Oil or Pharma or Finance, they exploit people because they can. Because fundamentally they’ve stopped thinking of the people they exploit as people. They’re just numbers on spreadsheets, data points on a graph or factors in a cost/benefit analysis. But there seems to be a particularly vicious streak of vindictiveness and amorality among the execs and chief scientists they encounter. Perhaps it’s just an illusion, a subjective impression they have because its food and food, as Eliot is fond of reminding them, is life. 

“Watch this,” Hardison says, in a quiet, oddly hollow voice, so they do.

The video shows the crops being dusted with the insecticide. It falls from the sky like rain, covering the plants below like mist. Once the mist clears the plants glisten as though wet with dew. So far so normal. Except that when Hardison scrolls forward a couple of hours to a rain shower, the rain fails to wash away the iridescent gleam of the insecticide. 

“That’s their game then.” Eliot nods in grudging admiration, “sell it as environmentally friendly, no run off of chemicals into the water table, but charge the farmers through the nose for whatever chemical they’ve come up with to safely neutralise the insecticide on the crops.”

It’s nasty but there has to be something more, something to push Hardison beyond anger to horror. 

“What else does it do,” asks Sophie. She’s got a look of intense concentration on her face, but she’s not watching the screen, she’s watching Hardison. 

“Show them the harvest video,” suggests Parker. She shrugs when they all turn to look at her, “it’s pretty cool, and, you know, kinda horrifying when you think about it for a bit.”

Hardison calls up the video in question. It’s the same field but clearly some weeks later, the crop now ready for harvest. (The plants still shimmer strangely.) A giant combine harvester appears in shot, it waits at the gate for a long moment, before a pure but strange tone fills the air. The plants all vibrate for few moments before all of a sudden the glimmer lifts from them all, rising in the air like steam from hot asphalt. Rising to a height above that of the harvester and slowly gathering into a cloud that glitters ominously above as the harvester works. A small drone buzzes overhead sucking up the cloud.

“What? How?” Demands Sophie.

“Nanotech.” Hardison states flatly. 

At the same time as Eliot says, “I thought they terminated those experiments.”

Eliot finds himself the centre of attention, his expression does something complicated – probably debating pointing out that he’s not actually at liberty to elaborate – before he shrugs and continues:

“The military did some experiments with nanotech, mini flying drones with basic artificial intelligence. The idea was to do precision hits on poppy fields. Persuade the farmers to co-operate or give up farming opium with a show of precision strength. Burn all the fields and all you make are enemies, but burn exactly one field…” He leaves the rest unsaid. 

“Shock and awe in action,” comments Nate. “But presumably not as clever as it sounds if the experiments were ‘terminated’?”

“Yeah, well, maybe it works somewhere tropical or temperate where the air is always damp, but the air and the earth were too dry in Afghanistan. Burn one field, you burn them all, doesn’t matter how small the fire starts, it spreads fast. And you don’t want to be caught in a fire in a poppy field.”

“Either they’ve resolved that issue or Oregon is damp enough that it doesn’t matter, because…” Hardison plays another video, this one a wider view of a selection of smaller plots. A different tone plays and once again the insecticide rises like a shimmering mist, though only from one plot, there’s a slight change to the pitch of the tone and then a crackle of electricity. A thousand tiny lightning strikes burn each individual stalk of corn to dust. The video cuts to a close-up of the aftermath, the fried ashy remains of the crop interspersed with the inert ‘insecticide’ lying around like tiny electronic locusts. 

“Then they just send the drone over to sound the homing signal and they wake up and get gathered up again. They can’t use the big drone to set off the fires yet, they haven’t figured out how to get sufficient shielding into them to be effective and yet not knock their big brother out of the sky.”

Silence falls over the team as all the potential horrors this tech presents dawn on them. 

Nate, predictably, makes it worse, “this insecticide they’re selling. It’s a subscription service, isn’t it?”

Hardison nods silently in confirmation. 

“Can’t pay your subscription, crops go boom,” agrees Parker.

“And when are you most likely to be unable to pay your subscription, when you really need its protection?” asks Sophie anger rising in her voice.

“Drought and storm damage,” Eliot agrees, “are they even storm-proof? They’re rain proof but are they flood proof? Do they stay together after a hurricane or even a tornado? One stray ‘insect’ gets lost and malfunctions during a drought, whole fields could go up. Forest fires, wildfires miles wide, Jesus did they even think this through?”

“Only as far a corporate liability and what do they call it, plausible deniability.” Hardison says, “I, on the other hand, used their data to run some predictions on the kind of fires we are looking at. Even without Parker’s _delightful_ suggestion of lighting strikes when the bugs are airborne setting the air on fire, it does not make pretty reading.”

With a few clicks he brings up the visualisation from his data model, the map changing colour to show the spread of fires as they swallow up county after county. Spreading out from Oregon through Idaho and Wyoming, to Nebraska and Kansas and beyond. 

“It’ll make the Dust Bowl look like a summer storm,” Eliot says, voice quiet like all the anger burned out of him at once.

There aren’t many things in life that scare Eliot and the few that do don’t generally scare Alec. Sophie is scared of a great many things, but she’s shyer than Eliot at letting them show, and right now the fear is written clear across her face. Nate is just watching the slow creep of the fire model as it slowly consumes the Mid-West. Parker reckons that something that scares them this much is probably worth being afraid of, but that on that basis, its her job to be brave for them now. So she slides herself between Eliot and Alec and slips her hands into theirs under the table where no one else can see, meets Nate’s eyes defiantly and asks the question that needs asked. “So, how do we stop it?”

Nate glowers back at her for a long moment before he smiles a not very nice smile and says, “Well…”

~

The glittering cloud falls to the ground around Parker like a deadly glittering rain shower as the lift shudders to a stop. Parker launches herself upward and exits the car via the roof, to continue her escape in a less conventional manner. She hadn’t wanted to have to risk using the EMP gun when she was carrying her own collection of stolen nanobots, especially not when travelling in an elevator but when the cloud had emerged from the vent she knew they had nothing good in mind. She hadn’t waited to see if their preferred attack method was electrocution or suffocation. She’d been made and it was beyond time to get the hell out of Dodge. 

~

Slowly, carefully, Hardison prizes apart the nanobot with tweezers. Parker had managed to steal him a whole handful of the tiny monstrosities, but every last one is a precious resource to him. He needs to keep enough intact and operational to be able to test how the virus works and travels through a ‘cloud’ of them. 

He can’t afford to waste a single one of them, he’s not risking Parker – or any of the rest of the team, for that matter – going up against them until he has a better understanding of what they are and aren’t capable of and more importantly, a more reliable way to stop them. 

~

“You think it’ll be enough?” Hardison mutters to Eliot, as he and Parker load up to make a second raid on the labs. 

“We’ll make sure it is,” Eliot replies grimly, pauses for a moment and then calls down to Parker in the pub cellar, “you remember what I said about the flamethrower?”

“Not to bring it?” She replies.

“Yeah, scrap that, bring it, and the gas masks.”

Parker pops her head up through the trap door and hefts are gallon bottle of vinegar out with her.

“I’ve got some peroxide upstairs,” she offers. 

“I’ll grab that and the bleach,” Eliot agrees, before catching Sophie staring at him worriedly, “for insurance” he assures her.

“Isn’t that a bit overkill?” Sophie asks.

“No, I think it’s just about exactly the right amount of kill,” Nate quips, nodding grimly to data projection models spinning ominously across the screens. 

Hardison thinks of the projections and the continuing drought in California, swallows hard and gets back to his coding. Either this project dies in flames or the whole continent will.


End file.
